Decolonization in Asia: India, Indonesia and Vietnam

Midnight in Delhi

Just before midnight on August 14, 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru rose in India's Constituent Assembly and said: "At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom." After about two hundred years of British power, India was independent. But the same night created a second new country, Pakistan, and set off one of the largest forced migrations in history.

Decolonization, the end of colonial empires, is one of the most important developments of the twentieth century. In 1945, about a third of the world's people lived under colonial rule. By 1975, almost all of the European empires in Asia and Africa were gone. This lesson looks at Asia; the next looks at Africa.

Why did empires fall after 1945?

• The Second World War weakened Britain, France and the Netherlands, and Japan's victories in 1941–1942 shattered the myth that European rule could not be beaten.
• Nationalist movements had grown for decades, led by Western-educated elites and supported by peasants and workers.
• The superpowers were both, in principle, against old-style European colonialism, and the UN Charter spoke of self-determination.
• Costs: holding colonies by force became too expensive, politically and financially, for war-damaged European states.

India and Pakistan

The Indian National Congress (founded 1885) became a mass movement after Mohandas Gandhi returned from South Africa in 1915. Gandhi led campaigns of non-cooperation (1920–1922), the Salt March (1930) and the Quit India movement (1942), when Congress leaders, including Gandhi and Nehru, were jailed.

The Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, feared that Muslims would be a permanent minority in a Hindu-majority India. In 1940 it called for separate Muslim-majority states, which became the demand for Pakistan. Communal violence grew. In 1947, Britain's last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, rushed the handover. A British lawyer who had never been to India drew the new border in a few weeks.

• Partition split Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east. Pakistan was formed in two parts, West and East Pakistan, about 1600 km apart.
• About 15 million people crossed the new borders: Hindus and Sikhs to India, Muslims to Pakistan. Mass killings, abductions and sexual violence followed; estimates of the dead range from several hundred thousand to two million.
• Gandhi, who had opposed Partition, was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist on January 30, 1948.
• India and Pakistan went to war over Kashmir in 1947–1948, and the dispute continues. In 1971, after a war of independence in which Pakistani forces killed huge numbers of civilians, East Pakistan became Bangladesh.

India became the world's largest democracy, with a constitution (1950) written by a committee chaired by B. R. Ambedkar, a Dalit leader who fought caste discrimination.

Indonesia

Japan occupied the Dutch East Indies from 1942 to 1945. Two days after Japan's surrender, nationalist leaders Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared Indonesia's independence on August 17, 1945. The Netherlands tried to retake the colony in four years of war and negotiation. Under international pressure, including from the U.S. and the UN, the Dutch transferred sovereignty in December 1949. Sukarno later hosted the 1955 Bandung Conference. In 1965–1966, after an alleged coup attempt, the army and its allies killed hundreds of thousands of people accused of being communists, and General Suharto ruled until 1998.

Vietnam

On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam's independence in Hanoi. His declaration opened by quoting the American Declaration of Independence: "All men are created equal." Ho was both a nationalist and a communist. France returned to reclaim its colony, and the First Indochina War (1946–1954) followed.

Vietnamese forces under General Võ Nguyên Giáp defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954. The Geneva Accords (1954) temporarily divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel and called for national elections in 1956, which were never held. Laos and Cambodia also became independent. Vietnam's struggle then became part of the Cold War, as you saw in Proxy Wars, Non-Alignment and the End of the Cold War.